The WI-FI communications technology has been promoted and applied massively because of its free communication frequency band. With the wide application of the WI-FI communications technology, security of a WI-FI network becomes increasingly important.
Because any person or institution may establish or set up a WI-FI network and the WI-FI network is open to terminals, some illegal networks such as phishing networks exist. The phishing networks are disguised as some public WI-FI networks that provide wireless access services for the general public, for example, a WI-FI network established by an operator or a WI-FI network established by a government, a school, or other public institutions, and deceive users into accessing the illegal networks in order to steal personal privacy, sensitive information, and the like. For example, a phishing network may use a service set identifier (SSID) and a login authentication screen that are the same as those of a public WI-FI network, and also require a user to enter a login voucher such as a user name or a password on the login authentication screen. However, an open access mode is used when login is implemented inside the phishing network, that is, the phishing network is accessible without any user name or password. Therefore, whatever information is entered by the user, the user can successfully access the phishing network such that the user is deceived into accessing the phishing network. However, in view of the SSID name or the login screen, the user may wrongly believe that the user has accessed an authentic public WI-FI network. When the user performs online shopping or online payment using the accessed phishing network, personal privacy and sensitive information of the user are rather vulnerable to theft by the phishing network and the user is vulnerable to a huge loss.
Reasons for vulnerability of a public WI-FI network to faking are that the WI-FI network is open and free-of-charge, and more importantly, are that the public WI-FI network provides no perfect access authentication mechanism.
Currently, for ease of using the public WI-FI network, some easy-to-operate access authentication manners are usually used to access the public WI-FI network. For example, authentication is performed using a short message service (SMS) message verification code on a mobile phone or by scanning a quick response code. Such access authentication manners are generally unidirectional authentication, that is, only a network, such as a wireless cellular network or a public WI-FI network, authenticates a terminal. Therefore, such access authentication manners cannot prevent unauthorized network providers from using a spoofing network or a phishing network to spoof a user by faking an authentic public WI-FI network. A public WI-FI network with open accessibility is even easier to fake.
In conclusion, because a public WI-FI network provides no perfect access authentication mechanism, information security of a terminal user cannot be ensured in an authentication process when the user accesses the public WI-FI network.